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Your connection to industry & member news | Feb. 4, 2021
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SCNN payouts return more than $335,000 to member papers S.C. Newspaper Network (SCNN), the sales arm of SCPA, mailed advertising network payments totaling $335,893 to SCPA member newspapers last week.
These totals include a record quarterly QuarterPage+ Ad Network payout of $294,281, a quarterly Small Space Display (2x2/2x4/2x6) Advertising Network payout of $9,752 and the annual Classified Network payout of $31,860.
“The demand for ads in the QuarterPage+ ad network during the past three months has been unprecedented,” said Randall Savely, Director of Operations. “We are thankful for the continued support of our participating newspapers and for being able to distribute much-needed ad revenue to our papers during such a challenging time for both our country and for newspapers.”
Every S.C. daily newspaper and virtually every member weekly newspaper participates in SCNN's ad networks.
If your newspaper is an SCPA member and does not participate in one of the SCNN networks, contact Randall to learn how these networks can provide revenue to your newspaper.
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S.C. News Exchange moves to scpress.org
In an effort to bring all SCPA services and resources into one convenient location, the S.C. News Exchange has been moved from a separate site to a section of scpress.org.
The S.C. News Exchange is a cooperative sharing site exclusively for use by SCPA members.
Regular contributors include Michael M. DeWitt, Jr., Tom Poland, Reba Campbell, William Hickey, Dr. William Holland and Stuart Neiman.
If you have an RSS to the old site, you'll need to update your feed.
If you have something you would like to share, please contact Jen Madden.
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Sign up for virtual senior management roundtablesOur annual Daily and Weekly Newspaper Senior Management Roundtables (formerly known as Publisher Roundtables), are coming up soon!
The Daily Senior Management Roundtable will be held Thursday, Feb. 25 and the Weekly Senior Management Roundtable will be held Thursday, March 4.
Both events will be held on Zoom from 10-11:30 a.m.
These roundtables are a great opportunity for senior managers (including publishers, general managers, ad directors and other key leaders) to come together to discuss the issues facing their organizations in a casual setting. During the limited time format, we hope to exchange revenue-related ideas that are working and discuss audience engagement strategies, ways to save money and the challenges of managing staff during COVID-19. Participants are asked to send in ideas for discussion topics and specific questions.
Daily and Weekly Editor Roundtables will be held later this year.
There is no cost to attend thanks to the SCPA Foundation Smoak Fund.
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Member Spotlight: Savannah Scott
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Editor-in-chief, The Johnsonian; Senior Mass Communication Major, Winthrop University
What do you like best about your job?
The thing I love most about my position is being able to connect with my staff and the Winthrop/Rock Hill community. I love that I am able to help my staff grow as individuals and professionals throughout this year. I am proud to see their persistence and commitment to the newspaper considering everything that is going on this year.
What is your proudest career moment?
I think seeing how much we have changed and implemented to the paper this year is my proudest moment. However, I cannot take all the credit for it. I just help with facilitating plans and ideas for the paper and everything else is up to my staff.
What's the most exciting thing going on at your paper?
While working with my staff this year we have started to try new things with our layout, redesign our website, made a weekly podcast, COVID-19 charts showing the number of positive cases in the York County area, and much more. We are also doing a lot of great investigative work pertaining to Winthrop’s Board of Trustees and holding the university accountable for the positive number of COVID-19 cases on campus.
What’s your favorite SCPA member service?
My favorite SCPA member services are the online workshops. This is a great way to connect student journalists with professionals from around the country as well as give an insider perspective to the ins and outs of journalism.
What adjustments have you made during COVID-19?
Due to me being a new editor this year and having to hire an almost completely new staff because a lot of people graduated, it's been difficult and rewarding. Everyone is working remotely and we are conducting interviews, meetings, etc. via Zoom or phone call. The only people I have in-person contact with on staff is my managing editor and layout editor when we do layout in the office every week. We are also coming up with new ways to interact with our audience through social media to keep engagement up.
When it’s safe to get out and about again, what are some area attractions/restaurants in your community we shouldn’t miss?
My two favorite attractions in the Rock Hill area are Food Truck Friday and concerts at the Courtroom. The Courtroom hosts concerts with up and coming artists around the United States. It is a great way to connect with new artists and also meet new people with similar tastes and interests while also discovering new music. Food Truck Friday is a great way to try new and different foods around the York County area while also listening to live music.
What is something most people don’t know about you?
I was actually a Biology major my first semester freshman year. I thought I wanted to be a veterinarian. However, after joining The Johnsonian my first semester it helped me realize that communications was my passion. Since I am graduating a year early, I want to take a gap year and intern at a lawyer’s office. I am looking at potentially applying to law school during my gap year.
What do you like to do outside of work?
In my free time I love to attend music festivals, travel, camp, hike, kayak and bike. When I am home in Charleston for the summer I bike everywhere to save gas money and the environment. I also have a sweet 6-month-old kitten named Stella.
Know someone that you’d like SCPA to spotlight? Email us your recommendations.
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“We know there’s nothing that replaces [newspapers]. ...In small town America, the newspaper is the only source of information.”
- Reed Anfinson, owner and publisher Swift County (Minn.) Monitor-News to TIME magazine. Anfinson says he has two goals with his newspaper's COVID-19 coverage: keeping his communities safe, and helping them recover from the pandemic’s economic devastation.
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Editorial: Not special; just right
Taking a decades-old page from SNL and Dana Carvey as The Church Lady, “Isn’t that special?”
Well, no. No, it really is not special. Frankly, it’s a real shame. A crying shame, if you will, that it took a newspaper reporter’s story — and possibly some opining — for Richland One’s public school board to do the right thing by ensuring all aspects of its public meetings are — get this now — made available to the public.
Here’s a refresher on why Richland One needed a refresher on what constitutes a public meeting:
Late last year, as public bodies galore had migrated their public meetings to the virtual world, Post and Courier reporter Adam Benson, who worked at the Index-Journal before moving to the Charleston-based newspaper’s Columbia offices, discovered that Richland One had for years been in the bad habit of removing the public participation portion of its meetings from its recorded and livestreamed channels. In short, if the public did not attend in person, the public was not privy to what fellow residents had to say to the board, nor how the board responded.
Save for what might be reported by a journalist covering the board, all was potentially lost when it should have been saved for the record.
Much like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar as the kitchen light is turned on, Richland One initially sought to dismiss the matter when it first came to light. There’s no obligation to even have a public participation segment in their public meetings, they reasoned, as if that somehow absolves them of any obligation to maintain records of what transpires in the open portion of their meetings. And, of course, there’s always that excuse of “we’ve always done it this way.”
From the Index-Journal | Read more
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How a small-town paper is applying conflict mediation skills to its opinion content
Our small, community newspaper in rural New Hampshire has always stuck to its philosophy of printing as many letters to the editor from readers as possible. Ed Engler, one of the Laconia Daily Sun’s founders, first editor, and former mayor of the city, prided himself on publishing almost every letter he’s received over the 20-year history of the paper.
However, during the Jewish holiday of Passover last year, we received a letter to the editor that denied the Holocaust ever happened.
Worse yet, the writer of the letter wasn’t a new name to us, nor around the state. He had publicly announced his intent to run for public office, a factor that we weighed heavily in our discussion on whether to publish his letter. The decision wasn’t arrived at lightly, but our philosophy remained front and center. We printed it.
Outrage and disappointment followed, at us and at the fact that someone held these views and wanted to share them with others. It was painful evidence that Engler’s commitment to publishing as many letters as possible was no longer advancing a healthy dialogue among readers, if it ever had.
The letter hadn’t, unfortunately, come out of the blue. It was an example, albeit extreme, of the increase in animosity we were seeing in submissions to the opinion pages. In our increasingly divided community, we had to take a hard look at how we could become part of the solution.
By Julie Hart, The Laconia Daily Sun, New Hampshire to American Press Institute | Read more
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Economy and COVID-19 top the public’s policy agenda for 2021
As the United States faces twin crises of high unemployment and a global pandemic, large majorities of Americans want Joe Biden and Congress to prioritize strengthening the economy and addressing the coronavirus outbreak in the coming year.
Yet there are wide partisan gaps over most of the 19 items asked about in a new Pew Research Center survey – particularly addressing racial issues and dealing with global climate change, but also dealing with COVID-19 and reducing the budget deficit.
The survey, conducted Jan. 8-12 among 5,360 U.S. adults who are members of the nationally representative American Trends Panel, finds that economic concerns once again top the public’s agenda after declining in relative importance in recent years.
From Pew Research Center | Read more
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2021 Resolution: Make journalism better by improving newsroom culture
By Patty Rhule, Chief Content Officer and Vice President of the Freedom Forum
News organizations covering the fury over the deaths of more than 200 Black people at the hands of police in 2020 and COVID-19’s brutal toll on people of color faced a reckoning of their own: How well did their newsrooms reflect the nation’s diversity and treat minority groups and women?
Three years ago, the Freedom Forum launched the Power Shift Project to combat the culture that allowed #MeToo scandals to fester in the media world. From our first Power Shift Summit in 2018, we learned that harassment and discrimination are inseparable. As we tackled the cultural change needed to produce equitable workplaces for women, we didn’t focus on their challenges alone.
We took on marginalization, discrimination, harassment and bias affecting all who are underrepresented in journalism. We listened to expert voices, learned from research and bore witness to open wounds.
We developed a curriculum called Workplace Integrity. We then trained leaders from media organizations to deliver it in their newsrooms and classrooms across America, which they did successfully. And then 2020 arrived, bringing new challenges. Read more
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